ATLANTA — Years after conservative Republican legislators started calling for zero-based budgeting, the General Assembly is within days of passing the first spending plan based on that process.

The reviews are mixed.

“It makes everybody stay on their toes and make sure we’re not putting anything in there that doesn’t belong,” said Secretary of State Brian Kemp. “It will help us when it’s not tough times.”

Kemp volunteered his office as a test subject as did Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black who remains equally supportive of it.

Less impressed is Alan Essig, a former state budget analyst and currently director of the private think tank Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

“It’s a nice buzz word, but I don’t think that anything fundamentally changed,” he said.

Gov. Nathan Deal agreed to adopt the practice even before lawmakers could pass it into law. His predecessor, Sonny Perdue, vetoed it, and legislative leaders considered overriding the veto the first day of last year’s regular session. They didn’t because it would have come the day Deal was sworn into office and would have been portrayed as a warning shot across his bow, starting his term off with tension between the legislative and executive branches.

Perdue nixed it because it would have demanded too much staff time. Deal pared back the plan he voluntarily instituted from examining one-quarter of the state budget each year to just 10 percent of state programs.

The chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees offered advice on which 37 programs to try it on in the first year. Deal’s office lists several successes from the inaugural year, including $9 million in savings and reprioritizing of spending in various agencies.

“The zero-based-budget review process included a detailed analysis of the cost and sources of funding for program activities, an examination of two years of expenditure trend data, as well as a review of the program’s performance through measures capturing the effectiveness, efficiency, and workload of program activities,” said Brian Robinson, Deal’s spokesman.

House Appropriations Chairman Terry England, R-Auburn, couldn’t name specific instances of waste or duplication turned up by the large amount of information it turned up. Still, he pronounces it a worthwhile exercise.

That’s a reversal of the attitudes in the original incarnation of zero-based budgeting in the 1970s. Instead of the General Assembly pushing it, then-Gov. Jimmy Carter borrowed the idea from Texas Instruments over the pooh-poohing of lawmakers who were accustomed to handing out budget plums on the basis of politics, not empirical data.

‘Counting pencils’

Carter required every agency apply it to every program in a systematic way. The requirements were so detailed and demanded so much documentation that clerks had to wheel it over in hand trucks.

“They were counting pencils and paperclips back then,” England said.

As a result, legislative leaders bragged about throwing away the documentation unread, and the agencies fudged the numbers freely until Carter was out of office.

Carter’s goal was to improve the management of government. Today’s advocates of zero-based budgeting describe it as a tool for shrinking government and saving taxpayers money, according to Thomas Lauth, the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia.

“The contemporary application of it in Georgia is much more of a symbolic way of finding ways to reduce waste,” said Lauth, an expert who’s studied the state’s budget for 30 years. “That may not be bad, but it isn’t what zero-based budgeting meant to the budgeteers of the Carter years.”

It helps to understand the notion of continuation budgeting. That’s when only recommendations for added spending get reviewed, either funding increases or the creation of new programs. Existing programs are merely funded at the same level as previous years without examination. Budget reports don’t even list how much is appropriated to individual, existing programs.

They see zero-based budgeting as a way to get information so they could make decisions.

In traditional budgeting, much of the decisions on where to cut or expand fell to the full-time state workers and the elected officials on decided by how much. Now, the Republicans want to be the ones making all the decisions.

Kemp voted for mandated zero-based budgeting when he was in the Senate.

“Now that I’m on the other side, I know it’s easier said than done,” he quipped.

Lawmakers were worried the bureaucracy was hiding boondoggles.

Essig, with a few decades either participating or watching budgets put together in Georgia, doesn’t buy that.

“The idea that they never look at existing programs is an old wives’ tale. I never believed that,” he said.

Governors have always scrutinized existing programs, if for no other reason than to find funds for their own initiatives, he said.

Essig also explodes the belief that zero-based budgeting will result in dramatic savings. It makes sense with programs that are descretionary, like the tourism-promotion budget or the state archives run by the secretary of state, not for the biggest budget items like education which is required by the state constitution and Medicaid that is mostly a federal program operated by states.

Without diminishing this year’s $9 million savings, Essig notes that’s a tiny portion in a $19 billion budget.

“Nothing they’re ever going to do is going to dramatically effect the budget,” he said.

Other limiting factors are the amount of staff available to prepare the reviews and then to analyze the reviews, and the integrity of the people involved.

None of the officials interviewed cited any instances of staff resistance or number fudging.

The limited scope of the review could be a major reason. Agency officials said just having to apply it to one or two programs wasn’t onerous or threatening to the viability of the agency.

UGA’s Lauth describes the process as scrubbing off the barnacles that accumulate in budgets over time.

Black said it has been a way for him to begin to change the mindset in the Agriculture Department when he became its first new commissioner since the 1960s.

“It allowed us to introduce that kind of decision-making process,” he said.

Although he volunteered to apply it to all three of the agency’s programs, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget narrowed it to the marketing program.

“It wasn’t just budget people working on this. We actually had people from the marketing division involved. It sort of helped those people get to know their division better,” he said.

The review led to limits on how borrowed funds from bonds are used and to requiring the farmer-funded, commodity management organizations to cover their own administrative costs instead of the department, saving taxpayers $150,000.

With the first attempt pretty much completed, people involved are starting to think about the next one.

“I would just tell people to be patient because it took the Secretary of State’s Office about three years to get up to speed and get used to the accounting system,” Kemp said. “It’s not something you can implement in a quarter or two.”

Gov. Deal’s staff came to a similar conclusion.

“We learned that the process needs to start earlier in order to do a more comprehensive review and have more interaction with program staff,” said Robinson, noting the customary September start proved too late.

It hasn’t identified which programs come under the microscope next, and it doesn’t plan to post documents backing up the first round until month’s end, after the legislature has gone home.

Robinson said the agency heads need to see it as an opportunity for them to improve their own management.

And he also revealed that Deal and his staff discovered there weren’t all the slipshot bureaucracies that outsides suspected.

“Since 2009, agencies have done a good job of eliminating waste and non-essential activities,” Robinson said. “Most agencies have managed to continue to provide core, state services despite average budget reductions of 25 percent to 30 percent over the past four years.”

A look at zero-based budgeting

The governor’s office lists multiple results from the first year of zero-based budgeting applied to 10 percent of the programs in state government, including: